Pragmatic Marketing’s 2007 survey results are in, and we’ve done some number crunching – looking at total compensation data. Total compensation is salary plus bonus. See how the numbers come out across experience, sex, age, state, and international region.
Big Picture
The first salary data to consider is the big picture. Pragmatic Marketing runs a survey every year. The questions vary a little from year to year, as they expand and refine their analysis – and we have some improved raw data to look at.
Note – all data has been scrubbed by Pragmatic Marketing to remove any identifying information that might have been present. Furthermore, in all of the analyses in this article, if any category or filter contained only one or two responses (for example, when looking at total compensation by state), that data was omitted from this article to further protect the anonymity of respondents.
[Update] Preliminary Results: Pragmatic Marketing just told me that they closed the survey today, and what I was crunching were some preliminary results. So we’ll go through this exercise again with a much larger data set. The early data is large enough to get some good insights, but we’ll re-analyze with “final” numbers when we have them.
As a result of this “secondary filtering” and the ability of respondents to leave questions blank, each analysis may have a slightly different set of data points, but the trending is representative.
Looking at 610 responses to the 2007 salary and bonus survey questions:
- The average salary for respondents in 2007 was $95,864 USD
- The average bonus for respondents in 2007 was $11,102 USD
- The average total compensation (salary + bonus) for respondents was $106,948
In previous years, we saw the following trend in annual numbers:
This data was covered in more detail in our salary data analysis last year. The 2007 data shows the highest average total compensation reported to date.
Distribution of Responses
The following histogram shows the distribution of total compensation as reported in the survey data:
Gender Bias
Last year we took a detailed look at how product manager salaries varied by sex. We found in 2006 that there were disparities – but not the ones we expected. For inexperienced product managers, men reported higher compensation than women. For experienced product managers, the reverse was true.
Here’s how the 2007 product manager salary data looks when breaking down by years of experience, comparing men and women.
For the respondents to the 2007 survey, there were three times as many male respondents as female respondents. That lopsidedness is most visible in the 6 to 15 years of experience range – where salaries are higher. As a result, the overall difference between the total compensation of men and of women is over-emphasized. For new hires, women reported higher compensation than men. For more experienced product managers, men reported higher salaries.
The end result is the following:
- The average compensation reported in 2007 for male product managers is $109,170 (with 11.2 years of experience).
- The average compensation reported in 2007 for female product managers is $102,236 (with 9.5 years of experience).
Earn Your Age
Another interesting slice made possible this year is to look at average total compensation by age.
Compensation by International Geography
Here’s some really exciting data. How does reported total compensation vary based upon location?
Our first data table looks at average total compensation internationally (as identified in the survey):
Some regions were removed from the table due to having only one or two responses. Also note – these are dollar figures as reported and do not take into account relative costs of living. The average field shows the average across all regions.
Compensation By US State
Most of the survey respondents, and most of our readers are in the United States. And Pragmatic Marketing’s 2007 survey included a question to identify the state in which each product manager lives or works. Here’s how the numbers looked, when sorted from highest-paying to lowest-paying state.
States with fewer than 3 responses were excluded. Note that only 8 states reported above-average earnings.
When we adjust for the relative cost of living (COLA) in each state, we get some very different results. We used second quarter 2007 data from http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/index.stm to make our cost of living adjustments, and re-ordered the list in equivalent dollars.
Summary
That’s the first wave of analysis – what else would you like to see? And a huge thanks to Pragmatic Marketing both for running the survey every year (giving us real market data), and for being transparent and allowing us to analyze the data.
